Setting up a Multilingual Knowledge Base

Modified on: Wed, 23 Oct, 2019 at 12:47 PM

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When you have customers from around the world, a multilingual Knowledge base can help you support all of them with ease. With multiple languages available on a single portal, it’s easy to collaborate; and language-specific meta tags help you find the content you need in seconds. If a particular article needs to be updated in a particular language, it is color-coded accordingly so that your agents can spot it at a glance. Your portal can automatically detect and load in a customer's preferred language (based on either their login or browser preferences) to help the customer find what they are looking for instantly.

Quick guide to setting up Multilingual Knowledge Base

Step 1: Enable Multilingual support

Before we get into setting up your Multilingual knowledge base, you will have to enable multilingual support.

Navigate to Admin > Helpdesk.

Under Manage Languages, set the Primary language of your Freshdesk account and then set the Supported languages from the dropdown.

Note: You cannot change the Primary language after you have enabled Multilingual support. All the solution articles you have created in the past (in any language) will now be mapped to the Primary language only.

You can choose to make certain supported languages visible in the customer portal and certain hidden from the customer portal based on whether you’ve completely translated your solution article or whether it’s work in progress ( Ideally, you would not want to display articles which are in work-in-progress to your customers).

By default, each language you select is hidden from the customer portal. You can change its visibility by clicking on the eye beside each language. For Example, your portal’s primary language is English and you support your customers in French, Spanish and Italian as well. Let's say you have solution articles that are translated only into French and Spanish but your Italian Knowledge base is not ready yet. In this case, you would select Italian as your supported language but hide it from your customers until your translated content is ready to go live.

For verified customers, the support portal is displayed in the language they have chosen in their profile. They can also view the portal in other languages by simply clicking on the dropdown near their profile.

Step 2: Create new categories, folders, and articles in the primary language

You are now ready to set up a Multilingual knowledge base. To begin, you will have to create a category for the solution articles in your chosen primary language.

Go to the Solutions tab.

Under New Article, select New Category. It will open a pop-up with the primary language you’ve selected for the portal.

Give a name, and description for the new category and click Save.

Under this category, you can add a new folder and start adding solution articles. To learn how to create a solution article in detail click here.

Note: You can create solution articles in your supported portal languages (Say French, Italian, Spanish) only after you have created its master version in the primary language.

Step 3: Create solution articles for supported languages

Once you have created the solution article (either saved as draft or published in the portal) in your primary language with appropriate tags and meta information, you can proceed to create the translations of this master version.

In the article workspace, click on the master version of the solution article you just created and click Edit.

Under Languages, click on the language you want this master version to be translated into.

While compiling a new translated solution article or while updating an old one, you can have the master version displayed alongside the current draft to act as a quick reference by clicking Show Master in the top right corner of the editor.

Note: You can resize the master content window according to your preference.

You can also add Article Properties such as the solution article name, folder name, category name, tags, change the author and add meta information relevant to that particular language.

Step 4: Identify untranslated articles and create necessary content

Choose the language you want to work on, from the Global Language Selector dropdown.

After choosing the language, you can access untranslated articles with a click of a button in two ways:

You can choose the Untranslated articles list view from the hamburger menu

You can also click on Translate articles button that appears after you choose the language you want to work on, from the Global Language Selector.

Once the list of untranslated articles in your primary language opens, you can click on Translate button that appears on the relevant article, to start adding the content in the new language.

You can also set up dynamic email notifications that will help you personalise the automated email notifications you send to your customer so they receive them in the language they understand. Click here to learn more about setting it up.